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[Silas Vitalia]

OK, here's the ground rules for non-catacombing and 'civil' discussion:

1. Understand no one ever solved an argument or changed anybody's mind on the internet arguing with them.  Ever.   We aren't going to solve the israeli-palestinian issue on the eve online ooc forum.

2. I want to hear opinions, debates, and general convo on the topic without it immediately turning into a shitstorm of derpery.  Disagree, be polite.



So I'll start off the conversation with my view that the Western media seems woefully uninterested in taking an even-handed approach to the conflict.   The ratio currently in the news seems to be about 20 exploded brown people = one exploded white person for the Western media to give much of a crap about it.

This is not limited to the Palestinians, it's just a fact of our modern society that when poor black and brown folks die in droves, it takes a lot, and I mean a lot of it, to = the same coverage and attention you get when a fraction of the same amount of westerners/white folks die violently.

I'll posit that with today's increasing dissemination of of media to the masses, more stories getting told from previously silent voices, how things really are for the average Palestinian will start to get out.  Apartheid conditions will eventually be well documented to the extent that western media will have address things head on.

[Dessau]

...I'll start off the conversation with my view that the Western media seems woefully uninterested in taking an even-handed approach to the conflict.

I don't have access to television or print media, but from what I have read on news aggregators and the like, there have been a number of cases where MSM journalists have been handed 'involuntary vacations' or 'surpise reassignments' for editorial comments which paint Israelis (both citizens and IDF) in an unflattering light. The suspicion is of course that these are punitive measures designed to have a chilling effect on other western reporters.

So the fear is probably anti-defamation lawsuits, as there is a well-heeled lobby dedicated to spinning public support for western military supremacy in the region, and their hawkishness tends to spill over into their civil affairs.

[Silas Vitalia]

...I'll start off the conversation with my view that the Western media seems woefully uninterested in taking an even-handed approach to the conflict.

I don't have access to television or print media, but from what I have read on news aggregators and the like, there have been a number of cases where MSM journalists have been handed 'involuntary vacations' or 'surpise reassignments' for editorial comments which paint Israelis (both citizens and IDF) in an unflattering light. The suspicion is of course that these are punitive measures designed to have a chilling effect on other western reporters.

So the fear is probably anti-defamation lawsuits, as there is a well-heeled lobby dedicated to spinning public support for western military supremacy in the region, and their hawkishness tends to spill over into their civil affairs.

I suspect this conflict will be one of those (many) things future generations will look back upon us with utter shame and disgust.

[Dessau]

If we are to believe that human civilization is on a continuous upward trend (in terms of health, security, 'rights', etc.), then your assertion would more or less follow naturally, I think. Hindsight 20/20 and all that.

[Desiderya]

I think it's irresponsible that ze Jews want to stop the Hamas space program again.

[orange]

Is this a discussion of a conflict as old as civilization or how western media portrays on-going ancient conflicts?

[Silas Vitalia]

I think it's irresponsible that ze Jews want to stop the Hamas space program again.

I'll ignore the sarcasm as it's a good point of discussion.   I think the State of Israel has unfortunately reached a point where the actions they are taking in justifiable self defense are being seen more and more as defeating their intended purpose. 

So when x Hamas action causes Y Israel reaction most people can kind of follow the logic.  The apartheid control on the Palestinians is harder to justify, along with the whole kicking them off their land and taking their shit. 

It's also ultimately self-defeating.  All those exploded children and women have family members and siblings who are likely non-plussed at being collateral damage.  It's not difficult to recruit fighters when most of them have lost family members or friends, and are living in a walled-in prison state.

My Israel/Palestine-fu is admittedly weak, but as far as I know the only deal that has gotten extremely close to working was a return to the pre-60s war boundaries and the removal of the Israeli settlements.   

Israel would actually get a ton of sympathy and milage if they signed up for those conditions, gave the Palestinians all the things, and then let it run for a few years.  If it fell apart after that they can at least have a firmer leg to stand on internationally?

[Esna Pitoojee]

It's also ultimately self-defeating.  All those exploded children and women have family members and siblings who are likely non-plussed at being collateral damage. 

This is the situation on both sides, really. The big difference is that one of the sides doesn't necessarily see it as "self-defeating".

My Israel/Palestine-fu is admittedly weak, but as far as I know the only deal that has gotten extremely close to working was a return to the pre-60s war boundaries and the removal of the Israeli settlements. 

To my knowledge, the Oslo Accords which conceived the Palestinian Authority as a mutual negotiating partner to interact with Israel were the closest in practice. However, they got interrupted by the Second Intafada and continued expansion of settlements before anything more than the set-up could be completed and before a more comprehensive, long-term agreement could be enacted.

Israel would actually get a ton of sympathy and milage if they signed up for those conditions, gave the Palestinians all the things, and then let it run for a few years.  If it fell apart after that they can at least have a firmer leg to stand on internationally?

The withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank was largely seen within Israel as a "trial run" for this concept. While it sort-of worked in the West Bank, Gaza fell flat on its face when Hamas took over and has kept the military conflict going perpetually. Since then any further "land for peace" initiatives have been viewed as more or less useless since the first one just gave Hamas a spot to launch its rockets and mortars from.

[Desiderya]

Silas,

[Silas Vitalia]

Absolutely serious, please join in the conversation if you want to be constructive.

When a people are oppressed and in poverty for a long enough time all sorts of unintended consequences will bubble up.   I'm not defending Hamas zealot psycopaths who do terrible things.  But there are things that create more revenge-filled psychopaths, and there are things that don't.  Treating people like prisoners in their own land and restricting their freedom of movement, access to resources, and control over their own lives tends to rub people the wrong way.   Taking their property tends to rub them the wrong way. Kicking them out of their homes and then bulldozing their homes and putting up new houses tends to rub people the wrong way.  'civilian casualties' tends to rub people the wrong way.  If my kid got blown up by a missile I might have a lifetime of hating the people who did it, and spread that to everyone I know.

Now Israel is obviously not going anywhere, but their current way of doing things is going to lead to permanent misery for an entire population just to punish a few of them.

[Esna Pitoojee]

TBH, to portray Israel as responsible for the situation in Gaza is mildly ridiculous in my opinion.

1, there are now no Israeli settlements in Gaza. The Gaza strip was returned to Palestinian authority and all settlements removed in 2005.
2, Israel has during this and past campaigns engaged in preemptive phone calls and "roof knocking" (dropping of flares or small, nonlethal bombs on building roofs) to give warning before actually destructive strikes are performed. In many cases this warning period has been used to pile people into buildings, either in the hopes of warding off an actual airstrike or creating casualties.
3, during this most recent round of fighting there have actually been Israeli utility workers dodging rockets in order to restore electricity to Gaza after a Hamas rocket knocked it out. Not joking.
4, Hamas has actually refused to allow aid deliveries at times. Again, I wish I was joking.
5, rocket fire out of Gaza continued incessantly even during the "lull" period preceding this conflict. During this time, there was little (if any) Israeli return fire.

I'm not trying to say that every Israeli is a pure and noble white knight; there's a lot of shit that Israel needs to get its act together on as well. But seriously, it seems to me that the most immediate (and eventually long-term) difficulties with Gaza cannot be resolved even if Israel opts not for large-scale military responses (as they did during the past "lull" in the conflict).

[Morwen Lagann]

Normally, my stance on Israel vs. Palestine is that they both ought to be treated like the two squabbling children that they are: you tell them both to knock it the fuck off, forcibly if so, and take away the toy they're fighting over because they refuse to share.

And while I'm normally pretty sympathetic to the situation the Palestinians are faced with, in this particular round of fighting, they are the aggressors, not Israel. Sure, it probably wasn't a great idea for some Israelis to kill a Palestinian teen in retaliation for the three of theirs that were killed, but Palestine and Hamas trying to play the victim card and shooting off rockets in response to that is pretty fucking retarded. Is Israel's current reaction a bit out of proportion? Maybe, but I'm a subscriber to the Ender Method, so I'm not really going to hold it against them given how fucking patient they have been over the years.

Now Israel is obviously not going anywhere, but their current way of doing things is going to lead to permanent misery for an entire population just to punish a few of them.

So right now, perhaps the "entire population" should get off their asses and deal with the "few of them" themselves so that progress could actually be made? At some point the failings of the government become the responsibility of the people to fix when it's outright harming those people.

I honestly cannot fault Israel for its response right now. It's become blindingly clear over the last several years that Hamas has no desire to participate in the diplomatic game, and would rather play with violence instead. I can't see Israel bothering wasting too much more of its time continuing to try diplomacy if that doesn't change. Unfortunately, the odds of that happening while Hamas remain in power seem rather slim. Which means that if the Palestinians want a peaceful solution, they are going to have to fix that problem on their own, whether it's by peaceful means or not, because without Hamas being willing to use diplomacy in good faith, all Israel's going to have left are violent means to deal with it for them.

And honestly, at this point, any non-Hamas Palestinians are just meatshields - in the sense that if they weren't there, there would be pretty much no reason Israel could give itself to not roll in and purge the shit out of Hamas with extreme prejudice. As long as there are civilians in the way, Israel has to operate with some level of restraint, however small.

Remove the civilians and it simply becomes a situation of a military standing against another military. Or a bunch of terrorists, if you prefer that terminology.

So, tl;dr on all that, I see removing Hamas as being the most likely solution for the situation. And that if the Palestinians won't do it themselves, Israel will. With violence if it needs to.

[kalaratiri]

I think it is unlikely that the Israelis will remove Hamas all together. Their aim seems to be more to weaken Hamas until they are no longer a threat. They would prefer neutering Hamas to removing them completely and having ISIS move in.

[Drakolus]

So the Palestinians, the populace that is, are royally *effed.* 

Basically they're the cause Du-jour for the Arab World and the various leaders of those countries love that they provide a great distraction to point at and say "LOOK AT WHAT ZE JEWS ARE DOING TO OUR BROSEFS!"  Meanwhile the vast majority of them keep just as tight borders AGAINST the Palestinians because they don't want none of that mess.

Hamas, the PLO and the various other random groups of clowns essentially have a captive populace from which to recruit, extort and generally take advantage of.  They essentially don't want the situation to change and as such they only play at serious negotiations.

The Israelis would LOVE to have happy-fun Jew land and kick everyone else out but they do sort of realize that the Palestinians were there first, even if they did jack squat with the land and essentially initially welcomed the investment and attention as they were a backwater of the various Nations over there and rarely got any of the "pie" so to speak.  That being said, there is a burgeoning percentage of the Israelis who have said "enough is enough" and are starting to sound more and more like their own personal bogey-man Hitler with their talk of eliminating the problems and basically "settling" them out.  They keep building more and more settlements (Armed camps and excuses to bomb essentially) closer and closer to the already seriously overcrowded Palestinian lands.  Add to that the lock down of any and all opportunity, be it jobs, recreation or even a day without explosions and they are just feeding into the growth of Hamas and the other clowns.

The long and the short of it is...there IS no solution barring one side getting wiped out or a mass migration of (probably the Palestinians) into their own new turf...which would probably just set a repeat of what's going on now, only with someone "new" playing the role of abuser.

[Vikarion]

I don't think what the Israelis have done to the West Bank is justified. I do think that what they are doing to Gaza is justified. But, as a friend of mine pointed out today, it's a bit stupid anyway.

Israel isn't going to bomb Hamas out of existence unless it flattens the Strip and everyone in it. And I have no idea how invading is going to make anything better. And yes, the way Hamas handles "protecting" civilians is just, well, not. But that doesn't mean that, as Silas noted, killing the civilians won't have consequences.

Ideally, it would be really nice if we could find a way to get some of the people there out of the mess, offer them immigration visas, if they desired. On the other hand, some of the most radicalized fanatics are there, and offering to import those to your own country is a no go.

I see no good solutions here. Well, one. Hamas could have tried treating with Israel. But apparently the existence of Israel is intolerable to them.